This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Good morning. So my stove stopped working. Well, no, it was working. It was just filled the house, the room, with smoke. So I kind of panicked. The Shogun rescued me from my panic, not from the smoke. Anyway, Heiko's gonna do something, maybe, if it stops raining. Anyway, I've been sitting in a very cold space and I thought, I can't wait to get to the Zendo. It's just, it's warm, so warm.

[01:01]

Anyway, it's very nice to be here in many levels. This is talk number two. Scholars plow with a pen. Orators plow with a tongue. We patch-robed monks lazily watch a white ox on open ground, not paying attention to the rootless, auspicious grasses. But how to pass the days? Di Cang asked Chui San, where do you come from? Chui San said, from the south. Dishan said, how is Buddhism in the South these days? Dishan said, there is extensive discussion. Dishan said, how can that compare to me here, planting the fields and making rice for people to eat? Dishan said, what can you do about the world? Dishan said, what do you call the world?

[02:03]

So this is our favorite koan at Gringosch Farm, as you might well imagine. Planting vegetables and making food for people to eat. What can we do about the world? So I'm going to continue with this other story about Hyakujo and the fox, which I think along with all of these stories really function at some deep level to illustrate the workings of the human mind. And to whatever extent we're able to understand these stories, then to that extent we can understand ourselves. So on one side of ourself wishes to hide from the consequences of our actions, perhaps even to make them vanish. Just as old Hyakujo attempted to do by denying cause and effect, he was perhaps hiding inside a teaching such as all beings, whole being, Buddha nature. There is no room in that teaching for error.

[03:08]

And there's no room for anyone else either who might tell him that it's otherwise. There's no room inside the solid enclosure of a self-made self. The self-made self, as the Buddha taught, is a result of actions from our past. We are precisely the living inheritors of not only our own actions, but the generations and generations of karmic thought and behavior of our ancestors. And therefore, what we do and did does and will matter. So this, I think we know by living the truth of that, that my ancient twisted karma and yours is inextricably entangled. And so too is life with death, right with wrong, self with others. It only seems to us that we can split these things into parts. Our job as students of the Buddha Way is to find the path, as I said yesterday, that runs down the middle, and then step by step to walk along it on our own two feet, or in Hyakuk-Jo's case, four feet.

[04:22]

Whether as dogs or wild foxes, as humans, ghosts, or fighting demons, our job is to live a life of simple elegance, with whatever it is we've been given. The true function of Zen and the true meaning of life is found in the development of our character. It shows in how we behave, in the actions of our bodies, of our speech and our thoughts, and it shows in our effort. As Robert Akin says in his commentary on this koan, Old Yakujo as a fox was not simply making a virtue of necessity. He wasn't just sniffing around making the best of things. He was playing through, not falling out of reality on one side into nirvana and not evading reality on the other side into samsara. He spent 500 lifetimes of inquiry into the Dharma, into the truth, as a bushy-tailed member of the dog family.

[05:26]

So once old Hyakujo was free from the grip of wishing to be free on one hand and fearing that he could not be on the other, his mind opened. He became flexible and he became curious. Where did I make my mistake? It's what he asked the new abbot of Hyakujo Temple, Hyakujo the Younger. So artful and skillful participation in this world is only possible when we freely admit our transgressions. whether as a fox or as a Zen teacher. Either way, imperfect solutions are the appropriate response for imperfect situations. Now I'm a fox. Now I'm a Zen teacher. So what about it? Without preferences, without picking or choosing, even in these seemingly imperfect bodies, we can live a life of ease and grace. Decadent Zen comes from the malpractice of Mu, of No.

[06:33]

From falling into emptiness, into No, and thereby getting bit by the poisonous snake of mishandling ourselves as if we are free. From both the old and the new abbots of Hyakuzhou Temple, subjugation and release depended on cause and effect. That is, it obeyed the principles of causal relationships. So, This koan isn't simply some kind of theoretical exercise. It is actually a very deeply personal question that these teachers are asking of themselves, you know, and of us. How is our life going? What is our deepest concern? And how are we behaving? Zen attention on causality is deliberate, focused, concrete, and practical. Now our school is said to be called the school of attention to fine detail. So it's only when Hyakujo the elder was able to ask himself, Hyakujo the younger, after his interval of 500 lifetimes, where did I make my mistake that he is released from his karmic debt?

[07:43]

Not blind means not blind to the illusions and the misperceptions that are blocking our view, our right view. This is the first of the Eightfold Path. And right view includes an understanding and a realization of each of these things. The laws of karma, as illustrated in the Four Noble Truths, impermanence, selflessness, emptiness, dependent core rising, and non-duality. Right view. And once we are seeing correctly, then there's right intention. You know, what do we intend to do now that we see things correctly? Is our intention to be kind and generous and wise? Right speech, conduct, and livelihood. How are we doing now? How are we making our living? Is how we live taking or causing harm to others? How do we support our lives? Right effort.

[08:47]

Right effort includes enthusiastic participation in the world. as well as a wise restraint when we doubt that what we're going to do now is very wise or very kind. And then write mindfulness. Mindfulness is what keeps a watchful eye on our emotionalized conceptions, which pass through us like rockets through the mind, and then to the actions that our body and our speech make under this careful examination. So I have another story that I like from the Pali Canon about right mindfulness. I think I may have told you this one, but I think it's quite good. There's an elderly spiritual teacher who sends his young disciples off to steal money for him, saying he's getting old now and he's going to need some more support. So he tells them to hide themselves in the bushes until travelers go by and then to grab their purses, being careful not to hurt anyone. One boy doesn't move. As the others are about to run off, the teacher asks him, why not?

[09:51]

Don't you love me? The boy says, oh, I do. I do love you. But if I try to hide where no one will see me, I won't be able to do as you ask. Why not, the teacher says. Because I can't hide from myself, replies the boy. So this boy passed the test. And the teacher then tells the other students, soon he will be your teacher. And then there's right concentration, or what we call samadhi, which means to gather together. And this is the kind of skillful conjoining of awareness with the objects of awareness, which allows the mind to abide for a while in peace, kind of blissful peace. So in Zen, right concentration is called objectless meditation, meaning there's just attention only, mind only, until even that. no longer appears. So as I said to you in class, I like to think of these elements of the path as being really lively, you know, as something we're actually doing rather than set points.

[11:00]

So it's right view, right effort and so on, shouldn't have anything to do with right and wrong. And so then I really like using this word writing, you know, an action verb for each of these teachings. So writing our views and our intentions, writing our conduct and our speech, writing our effort and our mindfulness and our meditation, just like we would do on the open water in a little boat. And the open ocean is reality itself, which is in fact where we all are traveling. So we didn't ask for such a thing, for a little boat, but we got one anyway. We each have a small vessel with an upright mast. and a rudder and a billowing sail, and we have a need to chart a course on the fathomless sea. And in order to chart our course, we are going to need to be flexible and wise, and we're going to need to ask for help, just as Yoko Jo did 500 lifetimes later.

[12:03]

And just like open water travel, these stories and guidelines for practice give us answers as soon as we ask. Question and answer. The sail answers to the wind, our eyes to sights, our ears to sounds, our tongue to tastes, and our seeking to finding, always traveling and arriving together. So there's another story about Zen Master Hyakujo's own awakening in which we can begin to see how his teacher, Matsu, helped him to break free from wrong views, from seeing and believing that the world was outside of himself. Once when great teacher Matsu and his disciple Hyakujo were walking together, a wild duck flew up. Matsu said, what is that? Hyakujo said, a wild duck. The great teacher said, where did it go? Hyakujo said, it flew away.

[13:06]

The great teacher took hold of Hyakujo's nose and gave it a twist. Hyakujo cried out in pain. Matsu said, when did it ever fly away? From that time on, Hyakujo was intimate with himself and with the world. In each single thought, there was a non-discriminating light. So the next step in our journey through the teachings of the relative truth is to explore how that truth came to be. at the time that these stories were taking hold and becoming what we now call Zen. And in order to do that, I have found it helpful to look at the world as it was believed to be when our ancestors were still living on it and then transmitting their understanding of the teaching. In Japan, that would be what's called the medieval period from about the 6th to the 17th century.

[14:06]

It's really interesting that during that time, Buddhist thought and ritual meditation, practices, symbols, literature, that all was being transported along the silk route from the great monasteries of northern India, passing through Afghanistan to Korea, China, and then on to Japan, all of them, virtually, every book was regarded as the ultimate authority. And regardless of whatever language was used or whatever varieties of text arrived, each of these held that the supreme value was in the words of Shakyamuni Buddha. So a good part of what allowed these teachings to penetrate very deeply into the cultures through which they passed is the rich symbolism and the kind of visual imagery within the Mahayana sutras themselves. And given the merit that one might accumulate by copying these sutras, these manuscripts became widely available throughout East Asia, both for lay people and for monastics.

[15:10]

I think many of you have seen for yourselves by reading the Lotus Sutra or the Flower Ornament Sutra, how they really spring to life through these graphic visualizations. You know, there's twirling galaxies and there's the reflection of the moon and the dew drops on the grass. So in borrowing from this vast imagery, the Japanese artists and monks created essays in the tea ceremony, the no drama. flower arranging and calligraphy and temples, beautiful temples. So we have our own connection to this wonderful culture that had passed so far and so long through Suzuki Roshi. You know, he's directly a descendant of the ancient roots of Zen. And I think we can still find all of these expressions alive for us right here. You know, we chant and we sit and we sew and study and we work. We make food offerings, and we practice perfecting our kindness and our wisdom.

[16:11]

So this continuum of practice realization, which began long ago, started at that moment when the Buddha gazed up at a star, and he knew that he was free. So given that this experience that the Buddha had under the tree was just an experience, it didn't come with any explanation, and it's not accessible to us through mere words, And yet after that experience, the Buddha spoke about how others might enter into this same transcendental realm. So as a result, our tradition has always favored equally written language and ritual enactment behavior. So in this way, Buddhist practice has always sought to heal whatever notions we have of splitting between our human minds and our human bodies. Kukai, who was the 9th century founder of Shingon, a form of tantric Buddhism, said that enlightenment occurs within this very body.

[17:13]

So the use of Buddhist symbols and ritual is how this tradition uses the power of the relative truth, the expressible, to gesture to what is ultimately beyond all human expression. Using objects as symbols, words can be two things at the same time. And still they remain just what they are. So in the example I've been using with you of the empty cup, in one level it's just a cup, an empty cup. It has nothing in it. And at the same time, it can be a symbol for emptiness. So this mere shift in meaning turns this cup from being simply empty when there's nothing in it to being empty of inherent existence when there's nothing to it. In Japanese poetry and drama and literature, flower blossoms become symbols of transiency. A lotus is a symbol for a life of virtue. A pearl in a silver bowl is a symbol for a luminous awakened mind.

[18:20]

And so too with the moon, a spider's web, a leaping frog, or a dog, and a fox. Each of these has a double meaning, symbolic meaning. in a worldview of a culture whose lens, for a time, was exclusively Buddhist, something like Tassahara is for us right now. As a result of this Buddhist view of reality, the Japanese, during those many centuries, were very used to the idea that things are not what they seem to be, a view of reality that appealed especially to artists and poets and soothsayers, all of whom included a religious message in their art and in their stories. In other words, they didn't just tell a story or sing a song for its own sake, they had a point to make. And the stories, for example, from The Gateless Gate, the Mumongkon, The Book of Serenity, The Blue Cliff Record, each of these stories has a point to make, a Buddhist point.

[19:22]

So the most important question for the Japanese during that period of time was the same question that Dogen carried with him to China. concerning original enlightenment or Buddha nature as something already that we have rather than some future possibility that we need to acquire. And so, as Dogen asked, why practice? Why bother? And in particular, why make such a big deal out of doing bad things? So just as Dogen determined that we practice for the sake of practice, Japanese artists, especially the poets, began to see objects as just objects and not as representing anything else. A tree is a tree, and a mountain is a mountain, and an awakened being is an awakened being who acts like one. So the means for realizing oneself as Buddha was by closely watching this imaginary gap inside ourselves between our ordinary mind and our awakened mind.

[20:25]

In the scene, just the scene. In the herd, just the herd. And in the sound of a frog, just the sound of a frog. Kerpla. Just kerpla. A common method for closing the gap between a Buddha and a sentient being was through the physical enactment of Buddha's voice, posture, clothing, thought, and virtue. just as we do in our renditions of Buddha here at Tassahara. The Cosmic Mudra, the Daihi Shindarani, Nine Bows, and Zazen Sutra Study, we use Buddha's bowl to eat with, and we wear Buddha's robes, with the emphasis on being enlightened and not on becoming enlightened. Our Japanese founding ancestor, Dogenzenji, once he had resolved his own personal koan about original enlightenment, also saw that there was something wrong. with the idea of a distinction between ends and means, between a path and a goal.

[21:28]

And so his resolution, as we chant often, was this teaching of practice realization as one word. Its enactment, modeled after the Buddha's own, is to wholeheartedly sit, not to make Buddha, but to be Buddha. So one thing a Buddha does not do is to ignore cause and effect. does not ignore the effect of their actions on others. And yet, just like Dogen and Suzuki Roshi and Shakyamuni Buddha, coming to realize the truth of their Buddha nature took them on a long and arduous journey through the darkness of their delusions in a world of upside-down views. Once they had heard Shrutamai Prajna, that it was possible to become free, they each found a means to illuminate the pathway beneath their own feet. For the Buddha, it was his great determination to remain seated until he found the end of suffering.

[22:31]

And for Dogen, it was never settling for some partial explanation or some mindless ritual. And for Suzuki Roshi, it was the profound suffering caused by his compassion for an unstable monk that resulted in the death of his first wife. We all need support in a small measure of desperation in order to undertake the journey to awakening. One of the supports that was present for both Shakyamuni Buddha and Dogen Zenji was a firm belief in the workings of karma. Do good, good follows. Do evil, evil follows. So once again, as it says in the Dhammapada, what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday. Our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is a creation of our mind. He beat me. She robbed me. He cheated me. They don't like me. Those who think such thoughts will not be free from hate.

[23:34]

She beat me. He robbed me. They cheated me. I don't like them. Those who think not such thoughts will be free from hate. Hate is not conquered by hate. Hate is conquered by not hating. Many do not know that we are here in this world to live in harmony with each other. Those who know this do not fight against each other. So knowing that our thoughts and our actions will determine the course of our life is both reassuring and terrifying. I don't think there are too many of us who could imagine leading an impeccably virtuous life. Unpleasant things happen to us and we get irritated. We make mistakes and we feel ashamed. We take what is not given. We lie. We lose our loved ones and we fall into seemingly bottomless grief. When the world is understood, as it was in medieval Japan, as a more or less automated system of causes and effects, there wasn't a lot of comfort for merely mortal humans who had fallen off the virtue wagon.

[24:45]

And yet the system of karma, as outlined in the Buddhist teachings, made perfect sense to everyone. It gave the people of Japan and other East Asian cultures a coherent explanation of the world and of their experience in it, much as science does for us in the so-called modern world. It gave both learned monks and unlettered commoners a map of reality that was easy to understand. The basic portrait of the universe was explained in terms of the wheel of birth and death. At the center, as we've seen, are the three toxic forces that cause this wheel to spin. A rooster for greed, a snake for hate, and a pig for ignorance. And around the center of the circle, it shows the movement of human beings traveling either upward on the wheel or downward. Upward to better incarnations and downward to the lower realms of existence, depending on either our good or our bad behavior. The realms to which we travel are called the Rokudo, or the Sixth Destination, which are universally accepted by all schools of Buddhism, including a very firm belief that karma is what pushes every kind of being up and down the ladder of the universe.

[26:05]

Do good, good will follow. Do evil, evil will follow. It is so simple that even a child can understand, just like in the story of Birdnest Roshi. Long, long ago, there was a Zen master named Birdnest Roshi who was famous for sitting meditation up in a tree. One day a monk came to visit and called up to the teacher, asking, what is the secret of Buddhist practice? The Roshi replied, do good, avoid evil, and purify the mind. The monk said, well, that's easy. Even a three-year-old child can understand that. To which Birdnest responded, Yes, a child of three may understand it, but a person of 80 years may not be able to practice it. So while the Japanese people and many of us truly believe that our good deeds will bear wholesome and delicious fruit, and our unskillful deeds are not so tasty, it is tempting to find some way to escape from the karmic consequences of our moral failures.

[27:10]

to find salvation, such as Hyakujo the Elder tried to do by ignoring cause and effect. That's one strategy. That's what we humans, modern humans, call denial. And from one point of view, that didn't work out very well for Hyakujo either, at least not when he had grown tired of being a fox. He wanted out, and so he came to Hyakujo Jr. to ask for help. The six destinations include the one for animals, which is at the bottom, next to hell, and just below the fighting gods, and that's where Hyakujo had been spending his 500 lifetimes. The animal realm, hell, and hungry ghosts are the least desirable destinations for living beings. Landing in one of these three depends on entirely how one is living right now, and the accumulation of karma that will determine the life to follow. This system makes each person individually responsible for his or her own future.

[28:12]

And whether it's fair or not, injustice is therefore an impossibility. What we also sometimes refer to as their just desserts. I hope that we have somehow grown more compassionate about our understanding of the social conditioning and the systematic injustices of every kind that have condemned generations of people to lifetimes of suffering that is not their fault. But that way of thinking, at least among some of us, wasn't what was happening in medieval Japan. Their thinking had to do with these ancient stories of the Rokudo, the sixth destination. So in this story of Yakujo, he apparently did not recant his belief that his realization of the ultimate truth had freed him from any further round on the wheel, and thereby demonstrating one of the troubles with belief, especially beliefs in one's own enlightenment, meaning that one is no longer subject to cause and effect.

[29:14]

This is a very hard one to get rid of. Yakujo seems to have had a particularly severe case of what is called Zen sickness. In medieval Japan, the cultural mindset, death would always follow by rebirth, the result of energetic residues that were left over from the life that was just passing away. And depending on our wholesome or unwholesome actions of whatever our previous life form, the new life form might arise in the body of a noble person or a bat. The six Rokudo options were quite enough to account for the multitude of living beings that in each era appear on the earth. There are godlike humans inhabiting the hilltop palaces. There are warlike humans endeavoring to overthrow the gods or the government. There are animal-like humans and the likes of pigs and roosters and snakes. There are hungry ghost-like humans longing for nourishment to fill their empty stomachs and their empty hearts.

[30:16]

There are hell-inhabiting humans condemned to suffer for a while due to their unwise karmic selections. And finally, the simply human-like humans who get by through hard work, a measure of honesty and devotion to their young. And this Buddhist classification system is this final destination that is the most desirable, simply human, not burdened by riches or fame, not covetous of our neighbors, good looks or modest fortunes, easily contented and joyous, doing nothing that is mean or that the wise would reprove. So these are the people who were most likely to attend a Buddhist lecture to take the precepts and to join the monastics in their rituals and their celebrations. So there's an essay that was written very early on in this era with an explanation of how the universe works as it was being introduced to Japan. This is by a monk by the name of Kyokai.

[31:18]

He said, good or evil deeds make their own reward or retribution the way a shape in the sunlight makes its own shadow. Pain and pleasure are produced by such acts in the same way that a sound in the valley produces its own echo. The person with reason to be ashamed finds that their heart is pounding wildly and looks for some way to make a hasty exit. If we didn't have illustrations of what is good and what is not, what could we use to straighten out those whose lives are crooked? And how could we differentiate the evil from the good? So this way of viewing the cosmic clockwork became for many centuries common sense. for people in every level of Japanese society. Whatever strange things happen to an individual, the explanation was always a karmic one. Dogen Zenji himself gives examples of such strange things in his essay called Karma in the Three Times. In one case, the arms of a woodcutter fall off after betraying a bear that was kind to him and had saved his life.

[32:24]

In another case, a eunuch working for the king of Gandhara regains his male body after buying 500 oxen who are destined to be neutered and setting them free. The king, amazed, rewards him with a generous fortune and a high position in his court. Dogen then says, from this story we clearly know that those who help the well-being of oxen, usually not regarded as valuable, receive immediate wholesome effect. How much more so for those who honor the fields of kindness of our parents and the field of virtue of the Buddha ancestors and practice various wholesome actions. This is called receiving wholesome results in this lifetime. And at the end of this essay, Dogen quotes the Buddha who said, Effects of an action will never perish even after one hundred and one thousand eons. One receives the results when the causes and conditions are met. Know that dark actions bring forth dark results, and bright actions bring forth bright results, and mixed actions bring forth varied results.

[33:34]

So refrain from taking dark and mixed actions, and endeavor to take bright actions. The assembly who heard the Buddha's discourse accepted it with joy and trust. And then Dogen adds, Even so, as the Buddha said... Once wholesome and unwholesome actions are created, they will not perish. However, unwholesome actions disappear or turn to lighter results by repentance. Wholesome actions increase by rejoicing. This is called never perish. It is not that they do not have effects. So that's what I'm going to talk about tomorrow is confession and repentance. which in a world in which the law of karma is inviolable, offers us rightly frightened humans a beacon of hope. Hope that the consequences of our actions could be softened by some honest reflection and sincere remorse.

[34:36]

Avowing their ancient twisted karma was the means for writing views and writing intentions and speech and conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and meditation. It was for them a means to an upright path, And the upright path itself is enlightened. A path in which nothing and everything is all that ever happens. Here's a poem about that by Juan Ramon Jimenez. I feel that my boat has bumped there at the bottom into something big. And nothing happens. Nothing. Quiet. Waves. nothing happens or has everything happened and we are already at rest in something new I feel that my boat has bumped there at the bottom into something big and nothing happens nothing quiet waves nothing happens or has everything happened and we are already at rest

[35:49]

in something new. Thank you very much.

[36:15]

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